Some of the resulting tech and geek jokes feel accessible to all. With others, we feel like we need a password, and that could limit the long-term appeal of Silicon Valley. But if it only settles in as niche humor, it’s solid there.

The storage hunters aren't warm and fuzzy. They're hard guys, always looking for the edge and the way to get that nickel first. On the other hand, they seem to like their work. In the end, what part of the American Dream is bigger than that?

It's solid, urban-flavored comedy. Morgan isn't likely to make anybody gasp, as Kinison or Richard Pryor did, but there's nothing wrong with telling a joke well and, most of the time, he does precisely that.

The premiseof TLC's new Breaking Amish is so simple it almost seems too simple. That makes the show a little disorienting, because we're really not sure whether we're gawking at a bizarre social experiment or watching five people make a decision harder than anything the rest of us may ever have to make.

As usual with premiere episodes, it's not until the end that we start to sense which contestants we can ignore and which ones could be around awhile. The pace will quicken once we have a better sense of the lineup.

Everybody has to work a little harder to find a story in this long-awaited sequel to Disney’s 2013 charmer Teen Beach Movie. And, like, so what? TB2 is crammed with catchy tunes, bright sunshine and a perpetually beaming cast of wholesome, winning kids.

It’s always been impossible not to like pretty much everyone on the show, and that remains true. But through no fault of the actors, or the writers, some of the freshness has faded. The setups here feel more like, well, setups.

Their tone remains generally civilized, but also awkward enough to make for entertaining television. Still, the more casual viewer may find that All-Stars seems to throw around a lot of "you had to be there" jokes and dramas. The food drill remains the same--contestants cook, judges assess--but the interplay among the chefs clearly is shaped in part by the back stories.

It's not great television in any standard sense, and the appeal of hearing about Christie, Joey Lynn and the ghost of Roberto could soon be as gone as the Dodgers. But, not for nothin', it's got a style of its own.

The connection of Graceland to real-life events doesn't much matter. It feels promising as television, and several characters besides Warren and Briggs--including a DEA agent played by Serinda Swan, switching sides after “Breakout Kings”--have the potential to make us care about their stories.

United States of Tara, which features Toni Collette as the title character and whose executive producers include Steven Spielberg, takes a riskier tack, giving the story a wide vein of comedy. In many ways, they pull it off.

Viewers willing to put in the work tonight could be rewarded with a complex, nicely turned drama. Those less interested can wait a week, when the 10 p.m. options will expand to include Jay Leno telling jokes. No scorecard needed there.

It’s getting there. If things feel a little contrived, or a lot contrived, that’s hardly a first for the show. They’re also tangled and messy and dastardly with a real shot at becoming sordid. That’s a good start.

It may be a couple of weeks before we decide whether these lead characters and their ensemble will be able to mix the soap and the political intrigue into a story that makes us care enough to keep coming back.

She seems distant and a little wary, like someone who has carefully built a comfortable life and sees no reason to invite a lot of strangers in. Her relationship with us is what she sees and shares. In the end, that seems fair enough.

Suspense-building requires walking a line, though. If you spend too long getting to the point, the bubble you’ve inflated starts to lose air. That’s close to happening a couple of times, which is too bad, because when we get to the reveals, we’d like to still really care.

Believe does require a few leaps of belief from viewers. The law seems surprisingly indifferent, for instance, to locating this escaped Death Row inmate. Still, with its seriously flawed “hero” and a girl who’s hard to resist, Believe could be an interesting ride.

Parenthood is liberally spiced with humor, and like all Ron Howard productions, it also has regular moments designed to make our hearts feel all toasty. But other parts aren't funny at all for the large Braverman family around which the show revolves.

A competition to find a junior editor for Elle magazine, where Slowey is fashion news editor, differs from a two-hour drama in enough ways so the TV show doesn't have quite the same charm. It's fun. Just not as much.

It still drives you crazy with flashbacks, flash-forwards, fantasies and all manner of other tricks that do help define the show's ambience, but which often interrupt the story as much as they enhance it.

The rhythms feel off. The cuts don't feel as crisp, the transitions don't feel as sharp. Part of this may stem from the show's deliberate and successful attempt to look L.A. Where the New York edition always had a little grit.

True Blood also sometimes seems to have a cast of thousands, despite being set in a small town, so all sorts of subplots have been simmering. The show evolves, as it has before, by starting the new season with a few more. It's a little wearing sometimes, to be honest, though it has enough narrative strength to keep hard-core fans happy.

Friends With Better Lives seems to be betting that we, like the characters themselves, won’t need much beyond each other. That could work. Especially if they tell an occasional joke that’s not about sex.

[The two plotlines] provides plenty of rich material for Sorkin on both fronts, and we can be sure he’s got plenty to say. The hope is that he will restrain himself enough so the rest of us can distill it into something we can digest.

The ensuing jokes aren't new. The men-turned-women only want to know if this planet has a shopping mall. The men still won't ask for directions. nBut Groening has never relied heavily on subtlety, and his strong suits, like timing and tone, keep things moving.

A well-crafted documentary directed by Nelson George tracking Johnson's life, from when he landed in Los Angeles, led the Lakers to championship titles, and how upon learning of his diagnosis helped change the world.

As it threads through a maze of sometimes shaky plot turns, you could say the script gets tortured--along with most of the characters. But there is a payoff, in the high-stakes cat-and-mouse game between pirate Blackbeard (John Malkovich) and Tom Lowe (Richard Coyle), a British crown agent who represents law and order.

This show tackles a genuinely interesting issue: how high-achieving men cope with what society sees as demoting themselves by staying home while their wives earn the family money. It tackles that question in a calm and at times even insightful way.

While some of the pilot strains to be contemporary with its youthful fixations, the only actor and character who really stands out is Atandwa Kani's Tumelo, a native South African who connects with Katie. Otherwise, it's the animals that make Life is Wild worth watching.

The best thing to say about "The Class" is that it improves by quite a few notches as it goes along.... The worst thing to say about "The Class" is that requiring viewers to come back and try, try again is asking a lot.

The cast works well together. They just have to fight some implausible setups and jarring shifts from clever and poignant to sappy and slapstick. ... Even assuming the show can keep the cast sick enough to be in the hospital, but so not sick it just gets sad, it may be hard to sustain this story over a full season.

Fox and K-Ville creator Jonathan Lisco get credit for setting their new police drama in post-Katrina New Orleans--but future episodes will have to settle down and get serious if the show is to do justice to its setting and potential.

Most of it was funny stuff, and the audience lapped it up, having long since accepted Conan as contemporary media's cuddliest martyr. For those outside the hard core, though, the sands may be running through the hourglass on this drama, from which Conan is the last major character to move on.

Time travel looked so cool and carefree in "Back to the Future" that you wonder why it seems to become so difficult and often downright unpleasant when TV characters try it. In the case of Dan Vassar, the time traveler in NBC's new Journeyman, it also gets unreasonably complicated for the viewer.

People victimized by terrible events and circumstances often feel pride and dignity are two of the few things they have left. There are times in Oprah's Big Give when it feels like those things may be slipping away, in the service of creating a splashier television show.

Tambor, a good actor, gets whipsawed by some of what he’s asked to do, and the show sometimes has the same feeling. It too often ends up finding neither the comedy nor the pathos in these tortured lives.

Not all Mortimer's posse seems shallow or unpleasant. But collectively they feel like the characters from all those nasty and wonderful 1960s Rolling Stones songs about neurotic rich girls. If only they were as interesting.

The first episode leads us into a series of Hitler jokes, which proves once again that even 70 years after the Allies liberated the concentration camps, Hitler jokes are really really hard to make funny.... On the upside, Man Seeking Woman still has promise. It needs to head in that direction.

It’s a good premise. But where both old guys are cranky and frustrating, unable to show they really care, Caan’s character is unpleasant in ways Eastwood’s was not [in the film "Trouble With the Curve"].

The performances here are good, right down to a cynical--and beautiful--bartender to whom Teddy tells the whole tale. But the action often feels like it was created by video-game developers, and what is supposed to be the subtext, about Teddy really trying to save himself, is about as subtle as a kick in the groin from a sneering DEA agent.

First, Catherine at times feels stylized, like a character from a ’30s movie. It’s alluring and distracting. Second, none of the other characters pops out enough so we’re immediately eager to find out what will happen next.

V.C. Andrews’ popular and creepy 1979 novel “Flowers in the Attic” gets no favors from the scriptwriters in this latest adaptation. The reason to watch, even when you’re saying “Yeah, right” to what’s happening on the screen, is actors Ellen Burstyn, Mason Dye and Kiernan Shipka.

When you get a headache just trying to follow a show's setup, that's not a good sign. When a show's twists and turns make it hard to concentrate on what seems to be a terrific performance from the splendid Andre Braugher, that's even worse.

To draw out the story by looping it through subplots and minidramas runs the risk of turning it into a fairy-tale soap opera--when what we really want to know is whether the tragic Snow White or the lonely Emma can in the end live happily ever after.

Not offensive. Just not particularly fresh or compelling. Long-term, "Outsourced" may want to become an Indian cousin of "Community," with diverse off-center people whose eccentricities fuel jokes. That's fine. The question may be whether, in carefully omitting most things that could offend, the show has enough left to endure.

While the new kids at McKinley get a few quirky gags, including an unsubtle Tea Party exchange, they feel half-hearted, as if only real remaining mission is to follow our old friends to the finish line. That’s fine. But we could have done it two seasons ago and not missed much.

Picking up a copy of the Washington Post from any day in his presidency would likely provide more insight into the man who led the Free World when the Berlin Wall fell and later launched the first Gulf War.

Viewers who don't regularly contemplate alternative-reality issues probably should tape the show as well as watch it, because the non-expert may have to watch it twice just to figure out what's going on, or even to understand what parts we don't understand.

Wilson plays the disenchanted slob well. But it’s not long before the politically incorrect insults and Backstrom’s general misanthropy start to lose their impact, and the cop stuff feels formulaic enough that there seems little reason to hop aboard his train.

What's good for Roseanne, though, isn't necessarily good television. We need something to happen other than a continuing low-level debate over whether Roseanne will accede to Johnny's bidding and get married.

Putting it [rocket-powered carnival ride] into a show on the Science channel doesn't elevate it to high creativity or some sort of scientific breakthrough. It's just putting a glossier frame around the age-old tale of boys and their toys.

Unfortunately, the potentially intriguing premise of this new three-part BBC America series, In the Flesh, soon turns into a heavy-handed allegory for how we treat anyone who is different and perceived as threatening.

So where "Dallas" was happy if we were appalled at almost every character, Lone Star depends on us coming to like most of them, including Bob. The problem is that he's not a guy who got drunk one night and wrecked someone's car on a joyride. He has spent his life stealing from people who thought he was their friend.

There’s a place for an honest, nonjudgmental show like Teen Mom 3. At a time when real-life teens are happily getting pregnant a lot less, you just hope no one’s watching this and thinking maybe it’s no big deal.

Chozen shows he’s still got the goods, and his prison years have given him rich material. Among other things, he declares rap needs to be more inclusive, which lays a serious message under the gags. Second, everything gets a lot cruder, an understandable decision that could downshift the show from unique to routine.

The characters on ABC's new sitcom Happy Endings seem likable and funny. So why, the viewer may ask, does the show give them such a forced and convoluted back-story that it keeps getting in the way of both those qualities?

While the fixings are here for genuine humor, Glory Daze repeatedly settles for quick-and-dirty. That's frustrating, even though it's understandable to some extent, because the audience for that style of comedy clearly exists.

Fatal Honeymoon seems vaguely unsatisfying--not because of its conclusion, but because it feels like an extended dramatization that in the end tells us less than a straight news report or documentary could have done.

It's all good-natured, upbeat and occasionally funny. Janeane Garofalo has an amusing role as a sardonic talk-show host. But mostly the viewer will be drumming his or her fingers, waiting for the inevitable to play out, which it does, with no particular distinction.

The show does a good job in tonight's premiere of sorting out the good guys and filling viewers in on the disturbing backstory. In fact, it may do too good a job because there doesn't seem to be a lot of mysteries left.

Somewhere along the way, though, this three-night, six-hour production begins to feel less like a compelling metaphor for totalitarian repression and more like a marathon. No offense, but is it over yet?

At times Babylon feels like it’s paying more attention to comic setups than the drama. At other times it isn’t. It’s not only confusing to viewers, it’s confusing to the cast, whose lines sometimes seem almost cartoonish.

While several subplots swirl around, Drac’s mission will be driving this story, which means we need a commanding presence at the center. Rhys Meyers plays it more subtly. That’s a valid acting choice. It just doesn’t make the story as bloody good as it might be.

So it may develop a cult following, and whether it does or not, FX deserves continuing credit for trying different approaches to traditional TV shows. Too often, though, Wilfred makes us work a little too hard for the payout.

It doesn’t offer enough fun to balance out the multiple improbabilities in its storyline, the constant time-shifts, the hard-to-follow scenes in the dark or what we’re expected to accept about the legal and academic worlds.

As in the earlier show [NBC's "Best Friends Forever"], both Parham and St. Clair create likable characters we wouldn’t mind following through strange, poignant, absurd, comic and ultimately endearing adventures. But those adventures get diluted here, at least on the back-to-back opening night episodes, by heavy-handed scenes you don’t expect or want in a USA show.

The soap keeps generating suds, while Kingsley plays it solemn and serious. Clearly, the producers started with the premise they could make this Tut anything they wanted. They just don’t seem to have ever decided exactly what that was.

The gimmick undercuts what could have been a decent doctor show with benefits --that is, a solid romance between lead characters Dr. Jason Cole (Steven Pasquale) and Dr. Lena Solis (Alana De La Garza).